“Possibly more intelligent than we are!” Corey shrieked in my mind. It wasn’t the best wake-up call I’d ever had. Having been in the military, it was far from the worst as well. I’d give it a three out of ten on the pleasant morning scale.

“And a good morning to you too,” I groaned. My head was fine, but every muscle ached like I was an FNG in boot.

“Oh, boohoo. You only have yourself to blame.”

“Blame for what?”

“You used your puny Will to steal mana from those wights.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“Forrest, you will shut that lice trap you call a mouth and listen to me.” I was caught off guard. It wasn’t the words – I was used to his insults by now, but it was his tone. Whenever Corey spoke, there was always an underlying tone of superiority and self-righteousness. That’s what I liked and hated about him. Now, however, he had none of that. It was like he was speaking to an equal, despite his words.

“Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“What you did to the wights, you must never do again.”

“Why not?”

“First, because it could kill you. You don’t have a strong enough Will to do it extensively. I’m surprised you survived the night. Most importantly because it is wrong.”

“What’s so wrong about it?”

“You reached into another person and ripped the mana from them.”

“And that’s worse than the creature killing me or one of my friends?”

“Yes, it’s bad. You didn’t just kill them. That would be justifiable. If you did the same to a person, it would be the equivalent of killing them during a rape.”

“Oh, god.”

“Yes. Now that I have your attention, you must never do that again, unless it is your life in danger. Not to save your friends, and certainly not to grow stronger. What are you–?”

I jumped up from the bed I was on and rushed over to the bathroom in the apartment. I made it to the tub before I threw up. I couldn’t stop shaking before the visions took me.

A man in a gray business suit lay on the ground as I straddled him. His body shook, hands scrabbling toward my face, but my arms were longer and stronger. After a few minutes of this, I could feel the pulse around his throat slow, then finally stop. I threw my head back and let out a roar of pleasure. I didn’t hesitate to beat on his chest, eventually breaking the ribs and allowing me to tear through the flesh and access the core in the chest of the body.

Days and nights flashed by, the many faces of my victims staring up at me as I killed them. Eventually, I was strong enough to simply hold the weak humans down with one hand while with the other, I could retrieve my prize. Once the core was free of the still-struggling body, it would pass up my arm and into my own chest, adding to my strength. I saw the faces of screaming men and women. I didn’t discriminate between age or race. A black man with a full head of white hair died quickly. A woman clawed at my neck and face as I crushed the throat of her child with one hand. It didn’t even matter if my prey had a core – I exulted in feeling the final breath leave their bodies.

Days passed like this before I turned a corner and saw the brightest source of power so far. This man was not prey. I finally found another predator, like me and my friends. The predator swung a bolt of lightning at us, but we charged forward, seeking to kill this target and take his power for our own. No doubt, the body would be a good prize for the dungeon as well.

In the heat of the battle, three of us attacked the bright man. The lightning pierced through the chest of one of us, but I rushed him, and the three of us went down in a tangle. I scrabbled for the chest of the man, my strong fingers digging into the skin, while the other one went for his throat. Now that I was closer, I could tell that the man didn’t have just one core in his chest, but three. The hunger surged in me, and I knew the need for this power. I gleefully saw the body of my companion fall dead, and the man ripped the knife from his eye. The knife came for my chest, but I ignored it, a savage pleasure ripping through me as it shattered against my tough skin.

That’s when the man put his hand against my chest. It didn’t hurt, just a slight pressure, and I ignored it for the prize in his own body. A pulse of energy came from my core, and it flooded out of my body and directly into the man under me. The energy pulsed again and again, so rapidly, until it was a stream of my power leaving my core. I wanted to scream at the violation. It felt like a tendril of ice had wormed its way through my chest and to my core, pulling the energy from my soul. Finally, the pain ended.

I woke screaming, expecting to find myself on the bathroom floor. Instead, I was stretched out on the twin bed in the apartment, sheets knotted around my wrists to hold me in place. At least I was wearing all of my clothes. The situation couldn’t be that bad, if I was still dressed, could it? Or that good? I shook my head free of my random thoughts, trying to focus on my surroundings.

The door opened a moment later. Andy hesitated on the threshold. Corey was in his hand.

“Hey, buddy, you gonna torture me, or this going a different direction?”

“Oh, thank god,” Andy came into the room the rest of the way.

“I mean, I wouldn’t judge you, but I would be kinda surprised.”

“Shut up, man.” Andy started to untie my wrists, just as Chavez, Carter, and Bragg entered the room.

“So, what happened?”

“No fucking clue,” Chavez said. “Corey said that you were paying for what you did to those wights.”

I shuddered as the memories came back to me. They felt so real at the moment, but alien at the same time. I had done those actions. I’d strangled the child and beaten his mother to death with my free hand. I’d ripped the cores out of the living people. And I’d felt my own mana leaving my body as it was ripped free. The events were as familiar as if they were my own, but my feelings about what happened were mixed. I felt elated at the thought of killing those people. And I felt terrified by the prospect of my mana leaving my body, the same as what I’d done to the wight. At the same time, I felt repulsed by those same events.

“Yeah, I guess I did,” I said. “How long was I out?”

“About three hours,” Andy said. He’d finished untying me and offered me a hand.

I took it, but only to sit up from the bed. I began massaging my wrists and rotating my ankles.

“You remember anything, man?” Chavez said. “You were laughing most of the time, but this was the third time you started screaming like someone was tickling you with a knife.”

“No, nothing,” I lied. I didn’t look up to meet their eyes immediately, focusing on the lacerations in my wrists, no doubt from where I pulled against my restraints. “I didn’t hurt anyone, did I?”

“Nah, one of the civvies holed up here got a black eye, but he’ll be okay.”

“Civvies?” I asked. “There are more people here?”

“Yeah,” Chavez said. “About thirty of ‘em. Scared shitless, every last one.”

While I recovered, they gave me the sitrep. There were exactly thirty-two survivors in the apartment building we were in. They were surviving by traveling from one apartment building to the next and eating all the preserved food. The group consisted mostly of children since most of the adults had died when they left their previous buildings hunting for more food.

The building we were in now was seven stories tall and took up most of the block it sat on. The group mostly kept to the outside apartments, only delving into the darkness to search for more food and water. It was the last part that was the issue. There was plenty of leftover food, but the water supply had dwindled to a few bottles. If they didn’t find more water in the building, they would have to move on again. And we were their only hope. God, I felt as old as Obi-Wan looked.

Still, who was I to refuse help to civilians in need? I mean, I’d done it before, but that was overseas in enemy territory. It’s not like I was on my home turf and the apocalypse was underway. It was entirely different. I grimaced, knowing I was an idiot for offering to help, but that didn’t stop the words from coming out of my mouth.

“Suggestions?” I asked the group. “I haven’t exactly been conscious as long as the rest of you.”

“And even if you were, it wouldn’t help much.” Andy laughed.

I gave him a rude gesture just as a kid came into the room. I quickly brought my hand to my face as if I’d been going to scratch my eyebrow, but from the look in the kid’s eye, he’d seen and known what it meant. I mean, he was probably about twelve. Some kids that age are already familiar with a lot worse than flipping someone the bird. I mentally shrugged, then followed it up with a kick.

“Pop says we have company outside,” the kid said. His voice had started changing already, and while it didn’t crack, it was a close call. Freckles dotted a light complexion under a mop of blonde hair that hung long into his face. He was lean and gangly, exactly what I wasn’t when I went through puberty. Even when he walked into the room, it looked like he was trying to adjust to some newfound height. His core was also strange, pulsing weakly in his chest. It was probably the weakest glow I’d ever seen while still being present.

“What kind of company?” I asked, getting to my feet and looking for my sword.

“Dunno,” the kid said.

“Where’s my sword?” I said to the room at large.

“Still on the first floor,” Andy said. “It was so damn heavy, we didn’t even try carrying it up the stairs.”

“Yeah, what the hell is that thing made of?” Chavez asked.

“Don’t know,” I shrugged. “It was X-Ray’s. Didn’t think it was that heavy.”

“Well, you must just be stronger because of your Citrine rank strength.”

I winced at the reminder of my improved strength, not because I was stronger than my team. I was usually the biggest guy in any given room, it comes with being six-and-a-half feet tall and close to three hundred pounds. I had gotten over any sense of self-consciousness long ago. No, in this case, it was the reminder that I had burned my pathways again to heal myself. I’d healed my face and my chest, and it meant I would have to heal all my mana channels before I could grow to the next rank.

“You still in there?” Carter waved her hand in front of my face to get my attention.

“Sorry, yeah.” I blinked a few times before standing to my feet. “I just drifted off for a second.”

“No time for space cadets,” Andy said. “We need a ground-pounder.”

“Well, that is a role I can handle,” I said. When the cold air hit my arms and legs, I realized that I was in nothing but my boxer briefs. Thank God for some mercies. “I think I might need pants, though.”

“I dunno,” Chavez said with his signature sarcasm, “I think just the undies and the sword would be pretty scary.”

“At least pants,” Carter said.

“Probably a shirt too,” Andy said. “No one has a chest with that little hair on it.”

“Come to think of it,” Carter added, “we should get you a mask too. Without eyebrows, you just look like you’re always surprised. And with the right mask, you would be more intimidating.”

“Right, so after I put on pants and a shirt, we can go find me a mask somewhere.”

“Seconded!” Chavez announced. “All in favor?”

Andy and Carter raised their hands.

I glowered at them.

“Motion passes,” Chavez declared with finality. “Now, can we find out more about the company outside?”

“Oh, yeah,” Andy said and promptly left the room.

It took me a minute to get dressed in new clothes. I resignedly kicked the slashed and bloody clothes into the corner of the room, also exited.

The young boy was still there, and he motioned me to follow before he left at a trot into the dark stairwell winding down to the first floor.

Six flights later, we exited into a well-lit lobby. The fact it was well-lit was about the only positive aspect of the lobby. Blood and dirt covered the carpet. Chairs and sofas had been piled against the now smashed windows to form a sort of barrier. Guessing from the mismatching pattern of cloth on the furniture, not all of it came from this floor. Glass, sand, and pebbles covered a central area of the floor, all that was left of what had been a large fish tank.

I took in these surroundings at a glance, but it was the people outside that grabbed my attention, and it was the reaction of the civilians inside that tipped me off there was a problem.

Three men stood outside, and I almost laughed at how stereotypical they looked. The one in the middle wore jeans and a fitted, gray suit coat over a black v-neck tee with a slender gold chain hanging from his neck. Everything about him was clean. Every article of clothing sat perfectly on him. There were no creases in his jeans and no wrinkles in his shirt. If I didn’t know better, I would have said the man didn’t like to get his hands dirty with real work. He wore an easy smile, his teeth immaculately clean and straight.

His two main henchmen stood on either side of him. In contrast, they wore olive green drab shirts and fatigues. Sidearms sat holstered at their hips, but they held M4s in their hands. The way their hands rested on the weapons was familiar as if they’d done this many times before.

I crossed the lobby to stand next to Andy by the entrance. It had been a rotating glass door at one point, but there was no glass left. I absently wondered if I would ever see a full pane of glass again in my life. Probably, once the world was sane again and people started to make things.

I noticed my sword lying on the ground, so I bent and picked it up, buckling the harness over my shoulder and shrugging to get it situated.

“Excellent,” the man outside said. “Now that your real leader has arrived, we can begin our polite discussion.” As he said it, his eyes never left me.

I knew why he’d said it. For the same reason, I knew that – despite his appearance – his hands weren’t clean of blood. His core shone brightly to my eyes. As brightly as my own. He was Citrine rank.

“Dammit, Corey.”